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It’s easier to write it down than to show my face. But I still wanted to try and break down some of the emotional burden that inevitably coincides with this skin issue.

I’ve recently started following Cassandra Bankson on YouTube and a lot of the videos she made, especially for the past couple of years, are admirable and inspiring. One of the things she talks about is also the mental burden of acneic skin, because even if no one says anything, there are still voices in your head saying: You’re ugly! How can you even look at yourself in the mirror? Try washing your face for a change! How dare you insult us with your appearance!? (or something of that kind), which only makes you feel more miserable than you already are.

Recently, a guy from my high school published a book in which he describes his good and (mostly) bad experiences there. Having studied language, I guess that was his most logical choice of medium. I used to paint and draw when I was younger and it was my preferred way of expressing the feelings I usually didn’t know how to articulate. Some of my drawings have survived my rigorous “revisions”, but I burned or threw away many — just as all my diaries. For some reason, after writing a diary for a while, I’d read it from the beginning and feel stupid and ashamed of my words. Inevitably, I’d burn the damn thing dramatically, almost ritually. Today, I feel I could’ve learned more if I had kept those scribbles, especially regarding my high school experience.

There are plenty of articles, surveys and “analyses” given (mostly) by non-Millennials about the way people born between 1980 and 2000 are the chaos embodied: they are lazy, undisciplined, narcissistic and unrealistic.

But to me it seems these authors are too comfortable labeling an entire group of people as socially useless considering that middle-aged and old-aged assholes started some of the most destructive and enduring wars in the Middle East and Africa as well as the worst economic depression since the Great Depression of the last century, all of which had disastrous and long-standing consequences for entire populations around the world – including so-called Millennials. And need I remind you that no one has yet been held accountable for this?

High school was an intense experience for me. Now I know that’s because I am a hypersensitive person but I didn’t know this at the time when I was going through some of the most important changes in my life. I’ve always been a shy motherfucker with people I don’t know well and putting me in a completely new environment with terrible coping mechanisms could’ve ended much worse than it had.

We may think we choose what we see and what we post on social media, but it seems to me that it’s somehow the other way around. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that Facebook or Twitter or any any other social platform has a mind of their own or that their CEOs and owners have a sinister plan on how to mind-control all of humanity. However, I do believe we put a lot of effort into filtering and carefully editing our posts online; after all, our closest and remotest friends, acquaintances and strangers will be reading/seeing/rating this stuff. We are mindful of what others will say and how they’ll see us based on our online portrait(s).

I don’t easily open up to people. It’s like I’ve created this thick mental wall between myself and the outside world. But it’s still relatively easy for someone to hurt me, it’s just that I won’t let it show. Bottling-up emotions has been my (ostensibly stupid) way of dealing with them. At one point I thought that I just simply wasn’t able to feel things; although, as I learned subsequently, that turned out to be entirely misleading. I felt so much that I subconsciously shut down. The world and people in it seemed distant and unimportant. It became easier and easier for me to disregard everything and just withdraw into the darkest whirlpools of my mind. I probably thought I was safe there.

I was just going through some of my documents, when I found this. I wrote it on 10/22/2014. I’ve completely forgotten about it. It was like reading it for the first time. And I wish to never, ever feel like this again.Continue reading “What I found”→

Obviously, I have to deal with the terminology first. I found that the term ‘faith school’ is most applicable in my case. Essentially what I had was like regular curriculum that you have in your local gymnasium (which is a term used in my country for comprehensive high school) + religious subjects. So, more workload and more bullshit than in your local gymnasium.